The U.S. Marine grumbled like a high school teacher beset with the burden of
having to play hall monitor on his lunch break.

Bawling out a group of Afghan soldiers squatting in the dirt, he demanded,
"Who’s smoking hashish around here? … We’re gonna find ‘em."

After finding a suspect, the Marine barked, "What kind of cigarette is
that? Why are you throwing away your cigarette? Aren’t cigarettes worth a lot
of money here? Hashish? … You smell this and you tell me that’s not hashish."

"It’s like having 26 kids to have to watch after – it really is,"
said the exasperated Marine.

Except this wasn’t high school, or even ROTC. This was Afghanistan, and the
Marine was an embedded technical trainer (ETT) tasked with training Afghans
so that they can eventually secure their own country. Forget initiation into
the finer points of tactical operations – these Marines were having a hard
enough time ensuring their wards had their helmets on correctly and weren’t
quibbling over whether to leave hot tea behind.

"I give a f—k about your chai! I care about the mission," one Marine
shouted to an apparently poky Afghan.

"I think if they introduced drug testing to the Afghan army, we would
lose probably three-quarters to maybe 80, 85 percent of the army," said
another ETT. The series of interviews, captured by reporter John McHugh for
the Guardian newspaper, was
broadcast online in March.

Fast forward 90 days to the most ambitious military campaign of the still
nascent Obama administration: the July incursion of U.S. Marines into the Taliban
stronghold of Helmand province. Afghan
assistance still left much to be desired. The frustration of U.S. and British
leaders was in full
view, raising the question: where was the Afghan army?

Considering the cloud of consternation – and stinky hashish – hanging over
the embedded technical teams just three months before, was anyone surprised?

Now it is autumn – one preposterously flawed presidential election and 280
coalition fatalities later – and it is still not clear where the Afghan army
is.

"My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist,"
said Ann Jones, author of Kabul
in Winter, in a blistering
critique of the U.S./NATO training effort last month.

"It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version
of ‘Basic Warrior Training’ 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan
from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get
the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often
returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name. …

"In a country where 40 percent of men are unemployed, joining the
ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many
families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but
it’s a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian
aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahedin – the Islamist
fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets – and many are undoubtedly
Taliban."

Forget what seems to be quite an open secret in Afghanistan. Every impulse
on the part of the military establishment, its think-tank surrogates, Capitol
Hill, and even the White House is to convince the American people that not
only is building a formidable Afghan army doable, it is the only way out of
there, however long it takes. This mighty goal seems less grounded in reality
every day, but that fact appears perversely lost in the surge-or-not-to-surge
debate going on in Washington right now.

That’s probably because both sides desperately need to believe in the future
success of the Afghan security forces in order to maintain their respective
briefs for or against escalation. On one side, lawmakers like Sen. Carl Levin
(D-Mich.), who does not support a U.S. troop increase, want to concentrate
all resources on training the Afghan National Army (ANA) to lead instead.

"[My] focus is to try to help the Afghans succeed by a much greater effort
of training larger numbers [of Afghans] … for their army and by focusing on
equipping that army. We ought to have a plan in place for a real surge – not
just of Afghans into their army, but a surge of equipment to that army,"
he
said to reporters in October.

Agreed, say counterinsurgents loyal to Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley
McChrystal. But in order to train a surge of Afghan soldiers and police – there
are supposedly some 90,000 ANA and 80,000 Afghan National Police (ANP) now
– the U.S. will need to deploy thousands of more trainers, they say, plus forces
to support and protect those trainers.

"To field Afghan troops quickly without breaking them in the process
requires close partnership on the battlefield, with experienced Western combat
units that provide on-the-job training, mentoring, confidence-building, fire
support, and stiffening in actual combat. And this requires Western troops,
in large numbers, living and fighting together with Afghan forces at all levels
of command. The faster the Afghans are to be fielded, the more Western combat
forces are needed. …

"In the meantime, someone must protect not just key population centers
but also the recruitment centers, supply depots, bases, and transportation
connections needed to create the new Afghan formations in the first place.
Close partnership with expanded indigenous forces is indeed the best way to
pursue counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. But this is not a plausible route
to reducing U.S. combat activity or troop strength there any time soon."

Biddle was part of a small coterie of insiders who served on McChrystal’s
summer advisory team, which helped to craft his October
assessment of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, Biddle’s
personal arguments are no different from McChrystal’s bottom line: that "accelerating
the growth" of the ANA and ANP is "part of a vital strategy to create
the conditions for sustainable security and stability in Afghanistan,"
requiring the coalition to provide sufficient "partnering, enabling, and
mentoring capabilities" until Afghan security forces are able to do it
on their own.

McChrystal suggested that the current proposal to grow the ANA to 134,000
be accelerated to October 2010. In fact, ANA end-strength should be double
that – at least 240,000 "COIN capable" Afghan troops "in order
to increase pressure on the insurgency in all threatened areas of the country,"
he wrote.

"The forces generated during this phase will have sufficient training,
capability, and equipment to conduct effective COIN operations and to generate
momentum," McChrystal asserted. "Tighter, restructured training programs
will deliver an infantry-based, COIN capable force in a shorter period of time
with the capability of conducting ‘hold’ operations with some ‘clear’ capability
while closely partnered with coalition forces."

Experts who spoke with Antiwar.com wondered openly what the commander
was smoking.

That capable Afghan national forces, loyal to Kabul, could be drawn in such
large numbers from the complicated ethnic and regional mosaic of the land to
do as McChrystal wishes is "a truism that isn’t true," said Robert
Young Pelton, war correspondent and author of Licensed
to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror. "There aren’t enough
qualified young men in Afghanistan to make that come true."

Especially if "qualified" means faithful to the central government.
Today, that would mean the leadership of President Hamid Karzai, whose low
public approval ratings rival
those of Dick Cheney. Unlike the fulminating ex-vice president, Karzai
still maintains a firm grip on power. But people in the southern provinces,
home to the Taliban and the Pashtun people (an estimated 45 percent of the
Afghan population) and where the greatest concentration of instability and
fighting now takes place, think Karzai is a puppet of the West.

"There are almost no recruits from the south," said Gen. Ali Ahmed
to the
Observer in July, noting that when villagers do come in contact
with ANA, the Pashtuns see them as an "army of occupation" primarily
composed of ethnic Tajiks. Indeed, the majority of ANA officers are Tajik,
noted Pelton.

"You can pay 50,000 men to wear a uniform and all that, but you can’t
expect them to continue on and to work for Hamid Karzai or some other illegitimate
power broker," Pelton added. Take a look at the war footage (when you
can find it). "It isn’t Afghans fighting the Taliban. Most of the casualties
are from IEDs and Americans fighting Taliban. When is the last time you saw
a story about Afghan villagers fighting the Taliban? You don’t."

These challenges were duly outlined in
a study released by the conventional and typically politic establishment
researchers at RAND in May:

"The ANA is on track to reach its near-term manpower goals, but there
are some hurdles to achieving the increased force size. The force is not ethnically
balanced now, and recruiting in Pashtun areas has been difficult. The ability
to pay the salaries of an additional 40,000 soldiers is also an issue. Afghanistan’s
GDP is only $11 billion, and the annual federal budget is $4 billion, much
of which is foreign aid. Increasing the army by one-third will strain an already-stretched
budget. It is likely that an international commitment will be necessary to
ensure that soldiers get paid. … This is not to say that the force cannot be
expanded to the new number, but doing so will not be easy. The issues sketched
out here must be addressed for it to happen at all."

Ann Jones, in her own critique, pointed out similar problems with the national
police (which has the double strike of being one of the most corrupt institutions
in the country):

"In the Pashtun provinces of southern Afghanistan, where the
Taliban is strong, recruiting men for the Afghan National Police is a ‘problem,’
as an ANP commander told me. Consequently, non-Pashtun police trainees of Hazara,
Tajik, Uzbek, or other ethnic backgrounds are dispatched to maintain order
in Pashtun territory. They might as well paint targets on their foreheads.
The police who accompanied the U.S. Marines into Helmand Province reportedly
refused to leave their heavily armed mentors to take up suicidal posts in provincial
villages. Some police and army soldiers, when asked by reporters, claimed to
be ‘visiting’ Helmand province only for ‘vacation.'”

"I think there is absolutely no question about that – the police and
army are a reflection of the society, and the society is dominated by ethnic
rivalry that infuses all politics in Afghanistan," said Gareth Porter,
journalist for Inter
Press Service, in an interview with Antiwar.com. "Everything is based
on that."

"I would say the non-Pashtun military forces are still more conscious
of being Hazara and Tajik than being loyal to an Afghan government, and for
the Pashtuns, even more so," Porter added. "It’s a complete failure."

Pepe Escobar, who writes “The
Roving Eye” dispatches for Asia Times Online, said in an interview
with Antiwar.com that he "posed the same question to Karzai himself way
back in 2002."

"He digressed," said Escobar. "There’s virtually no way a significant
number of Pashtuns will be part of the army. They’d rather pledge allegiance
to their local warlords – and the pay and the perks are better. It’s a mirage
to believe in an Afghan army equally divided between Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks,
and Pashtuns. They’d be mostly Tajiks. As far as most of the Pashtun lands
are concerned, this is an anathema."

The August election, the results of which have been deemed fraudulent enough
to require
a runoff between President Karzai and his runner-up, former foreign minister
Abdullah Abdullah (who told Fox News on Sunday that without the infusion of
more American troops, his country could be overtaken by the Taliban), has only
exacerbated recruiting problems across the board. See this
report from Jerome Starkey on the Afghan National Police:

"Afghanistan’s security forces are faltering as potential recruits
refuse to sign up and thousands of trained men leave, amid spiraling Taliban
violence and ongoing political instability linked to the unresolved election.

"About one in three policemen quits the force each year, The
Scotsman has learned, while the country’s largest training center is
operating at quarter capacity."

“‘We simply can’t recruit enough police,’ said Gen. Khudadad Agha, the
officer in charge of training countrywide. ‘The salary is low and the job is
very dangerous.’"

As for cultivating "friendly" militias to fight the enemy instead,
that’s "generally considered a non-starter" by most objective experts,
said Porter, because it would introduce the same uncertainty about the militias’
loyalty to Kabul and their Western benefactors.

So where does this leave the American effort, the "way forward"?
The Obama administration has already dismissed
a reduction in the number of troops, much less a withdrawal, as a viable alternative.
He, too, is banking on the ghostly Afghan security forces to ease the burden
there.

Thus is the disconnect between rhetoric and reality. Unless all of the above-mentioned
issues are magically resolved, there will be no Afghan security forces strong
enough to "hold and build" even if coalition forces are able to "clear"
the Pashtun strongholds of Taliban in the near future. Even Marines who say
they’ve made some progress securing areas in Helmand don’t
believe it can last without help from the people.

There is no better illustration of this disconnect than the
aforementioned ETTs being forced to play high-school task masters. One
sounded eerily like a frustrated guidance counselor as he spoke to an Afghan
officer: "You have to figure out what motivates your soldiers. You need
to get that sense of nationalism. You know, that Afghanistan can be a good
country that will play on a global scale with all these other countries … and
be the Afghanistan of history."

Whatever that might be. The Afghan officer, fully aware what he was up against,
sat impassively, as if just biding his time.

20120270505 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2Fvlahos%2F2009%2F10%2F26%2Fafghan-army-mia%2FAfghan+Army+MIA2009-10-27+06%3A00%3A31Kelley+B.+Vlahoshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D2012027050 to “Afghan Army MIA”

I love this article. As a libertarian of the "ahem" lower sort, I really appreciate the Afghani attitude towards authority. In the mid-seventies I had a big chunk of hash with a gold Govt. of Afghanistan seal on it. I tried to save it, I really did. Now, they keep the hash for personal consumption, and export the poison to the west.

It's kind of ironic, that, however blighted my life may be because of my drug use, (and it doesn't seem very blighted to me), in these matters, I'm objectively smarter than a President, a General, and Stephen Biddle. Of the Council of Foreign Relations.
Biggest. Dipshits. Lately.

Using Tajiks and Hazaras to police and conduct counterisurgency operations in Pashtun populated areas??? Are these people complete idiots?! Are they blindly unaware of what kind of vicious, bloody civil wars these people fought with each other before 2001? Do they have any idea what these tribes do to each other when there are no foreigners around occupying the country? These politicians, analysts, Pentagon brass really do not have ANY idea about what kind of mess they have gotten themselves into.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer, is a longtime
political reporter for FoxNews.com and
a contributing editor at The American Conservative.
She is also a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine. Her Twitter account is @KelleyBVlahos.